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Sustainable holidays in Cornwall

Hendra Environmental – Sustainable Tourism

Hendra’s commitment to being a sustainable business has been recognised with the Gold Award for Sustainable Tourism at the 2016/17 Cornwall Tourism Awards, building on the ‘Winner of Winners’ award at the Cornwall Sustainability Awards in 2011. Our care of the environment has earned us a South West in Bloom 2016 Gold award together with accreditation by the Green Acorn SECTA Scheme in 2015.

Hendra actively, and continuously, strives to reduce the impact of its operation on the environment and landscape. The following information, documents and downloads detail the various projects and systems implemented.

We have recently invested in a wide range of energy efficiency and upgrade measures throughout the Oasis fun pools with the aim of reducing the facilities’ dependence on fossil fuels, thereby reducing the carbon footprint of the Oasis. It was critical that the visitor experience was not unreasonably compromised, so the implementation of technologies had to be carefully evaluated and continually monitored. Such measures included a new ultra-efficient pool water filtration & heating system, thermal storage, and a re-engineered air handling unit, together with a management system to integrate the running of these various elements.

We were grateful to receive support through the European Regional Development Fund to help enhance the sustainability of the Oasis fun pools and reduce our impact on the environment.

Hendra has built a Biomass boiler which uses woodchip to heat the indoor pool. The fuel store will hold over 30 Tonnes of woodchips and each year we will use around 300 Tonnes of sourced woodchip to displace up to 60,000 litres of oil used per year. The wood chip will be sourced from local and sustainable sources, and we have supplemented this with cuttings from around the Park (especially when we had to fell the Pine trees earlier in 2016).

In 2015 we were very excited to fire up our second biomass boiler to complement the original boiler and extend our non-fossil fuel heating capability via an underground heat main to both the outdoor pool and Oak shower block, saving a further 40,000 litres of oil each year!

This will save around 350 Tonnes of CO2, further reducing our carbon footprint to 20% of our 2001 level. The emissions from the burning process are very clean and good for the environment, with the only by-product being a 1% ash residue. This ash has a rich content and we will spread this on our grounds as a supplement to fertiliser.

In 2011 Hendra switched over to our new 10-acres solar farm, built adjacent to the park. The 1.5 Megawatt facility is believed to be one of the first large installations to go live in the UK and will provide 75% of the power to what is one of Cornwall’s biggest holiday facilities. Six thousand two hundred and sixty 230W solar panels have been installed adjacent to Hendra.

Jon Hyatt for Hendra said, ‘Its always been a concern for Hendra that we operate the business in sustainable way, minimising the impact on the environment as much as possible.’

A live overview of the output from SunPower Meadow can be found here. To view the SunPower Meadow case study on the Regen SW website please click here.